Visualising European Crime Fiction: New Digital Tools and Approaches to the Study of Transnational Popular Culture

在过去的两个世纪里，文化产业为流行图标、人物和故事的超国家遗产的诞生做出了巨大贡献。从一开始，通俗文学就是文字和图像从一个国家传播到另一个国家的主要媒介之一。尽管需要解决现代社会的这些关键方面，但关于流行文化的跨国层面的历史研究才刚刚开始出现。然而，以前的尝试总是面临处理海量数据的问题。拟议的项目旨在解决如何通过使用专用数字工具对这一生产进行调查的问题。由于大众文学和媒体文化协会(LPCM)建立的数据库以及与欧洲图书馆的合作，贝尔法斯特大学、利摩日大学和德布勒森大学的三个研究小组将能够收集欧洲48个国家图书馆的目录，并借助地图和图表分析流行小说的跨国层面。2008年，一个由国际和跨学科学者组成的小组获得了欧洲委员会文化方案的资助，开展了一项开创性的倡议，题为电子流行音乐：通过电影、漫画和连载文学(1850-1930年)传播欧洲文化的流行根源。2011年，这个小组诞生了LPCM，目前有来自欧洲和其他15个国家的研究人员参与。2012-2013年，为了用创新的研究和联网工具支持LPCM的倡议，利摩日大学的IT服务部开发了该项目的核心数据库。计划活动的一个主要目标是验证利用该数据库与国家图书馆和专业图书馆等非学术机构建立合作的可能性。除了与欧洲图书馆的重要关系外，该项目还与犯罪文献图书馆(Bilipo)密切合作，该图书馆是巴黎的一家公共图书馆，专门出版以犯罪为主题的出版物。参与该项目的研究人员将与图书馆工作人员合作，帮助他们利用数据库作为工具，更好地组织和研究自己的藏品，并通过虚拟展览推广其内容。犯罪小说已被选为一个案例研究，以测试数据库的潜力，并开发能够回答参与者研究问题的额外搜索、组织和可视化工具。通过收集欧洲图书馆的资料库，这三个研究小组将研究犯罪小说在整个20世纪是如何在一些欧洲国家被保存和编目的，他们都是由这一文学流派的专家培训的。研究的重点将放在对这次调查中出现的不同(跨)国家语料库进行比较，并讨论如何使用地学和统计方法来分析和可视化收集的数据。其他产出包括：两次讲习班和一次会议，以传播研究成果；同行评议期刊《Belphégor》的特刊，其中将包括会议论文的精选；两次虚拟展览；几位欧洲犯罪小说作者参加的一系列公共活动；向AHRC或ERC提交赠款申请，以扩大技术手段的实施，并使从事其他语料库的文学研究领域的研究人员能够获得这些文件。

Over the last two centuries culture industries have made a dramatic contribution to the birth of a supranational heritage of popular icons, characters and stories. From the very beginning of this phenomenon, popular literature has been one of the key media for the circulation of texts and images from one country to another. Despite the need to address such crucial aspects of modern society, studies on the history of the transnational dimension of popular culture have only recently started to appear. Previous attempts, however, have always been confronted with the problem of dealing with an immense amount of data. The proposed project intends to address the question of how to conduct surveys of this production through the use of dedicated digital tools. Thanks to the database created by the Popular Literature and Media Culture association (LPCM), and the collaboration with the European Library, three research teams from the Universities of Belfast, Limoges and Debrecen will be able to harvest the catalogues of the 48 European national libraries and to analyse the transnational dimension of popular fiction with the help of maps and graphs.The present proposal builds on 5 years of collaborative work carried out by an established network of European universities. In 2008, an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars received funding from the European Commission's Culture Programme for a ground-breaking initiative entitled EPOP: Popular Roots of European Culture through Film, Comics and Serial Literature (1850-1930). In 2011, this group gave birth to the LPCM, currently involving researchers from 15 countries, in Europe and beyond. In 2012-2013, to support the initiatives of the LPCM with an innovative research and networking tool, the IT Services of the University of Limoges developed the database at the core of the project.A major objective of the planned activities is to verify the possibility of using the database to establish collaboration with non-academic institutions such as national and specialised libraries. In addition to the important relationship with the European Library, the project involves a close collaboration with the Library of Crime Literature (Bilipo) a Parisian public library exclusively concerned with crime-themed publications. The researchers involved in the project will work together with the staff of the library to assist them in using the database as a tool to better organize and study their own collection and to promote its contents through virtual exhibitions.Crime fiction has been chosen as a case study to test the potential of the database and to develop additional search, organisational and visualization tools that are able to answer the participants' research questions. By harvesting the European Library's repositories, the three research teams, all trained by specialists of this literary genre, will look at how crime novels have been held and catalogued throughout the twentieth century in a number of European countries. Research will be focused on the comparison of the different (trans-)national corpora to emerge from this survey, and to discuss how to use geomatic and statistical approaches to analyse and visualise the collected data. Established accounts of the history of the genre will be challenged through a quantitative perspective whose aim in particular is to stress the lack of transnational studies.Other outputs include: two workshops and a conference to disseminate the research results; a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Belphégor, that will include a selection of the conference papers; two virtual exhibitions; a series of public events, with the participation of several European authors of crime fiction; the submission of a grant application to the AHRC or the ERC to expand the implementation of the technical instruments, and to make them accessible to researchers working on other corpora in all areas of literary studies.